The Postgraduate Experience: Learning, Agency and Adaptation in Higher Education

Governing learning: power, practice and the postgraduate experience

This project examines how postgraduate learning is shaped through the interplay of academic, social and institutional conditions. Moving beyond individualised or skills-based accounts of learning, it conceptualises postgraduate education as a field of practice in which power effects operate by structuring expectations, shaping participation and delimiting what counts as legitimate knowledge and success.

Drawing on Foucauldian perspectives, the study explores how students are positioned within contemporary higher education as self-regulating subjects, expected to demonstrate adaptability, resilience and autonomy. It investigates how these expectations are produced through teaching, assessment and institutional discourses and how they are taken up, negotiated or resisted by students in practice.

Adaptation, negotiation and lived experience

The project draws on qualitative data from postgraduate students across UK higher education institutions, using surveys, interviews and focus groups to capture a diverse range of experiences. The research pays particular attention to how students navigate different academic cultures, especially in internationalised contexts and how prior educational experiences, disciplinary expectations and external commitments shape their engagement.

Rather than viewing learning as a linear progression, the study foregrounds processes of adaptation and negotiation. Students are understood as active participants who continually rework their practices in response to shifting institutional demands, often under conditions of uncertainty, constraint and uneven support. In this sense, postgraduate learning emerges as a situated and relational process, shaped through ongoing interactions between individual trajectories and institutional structures. The research positions postgraduate education not simply as a stage of academic development, but as a site where broader processes of governance, subject formation and adaptation are played out, opening up new ways of understanding learning and participation in higher education.

Ongoing research and outputs

This is an ongoing programme of research, with emerging findings contributing to current debates on postgraduate pedagogy, affect and educational governance. Early outputs from the project can be found here via this website link.